On 8/30/06, Steve Langasek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: ... ...
... you've correctly pointed out that at least one of the sound files in this package appears to be copyrighted and distributed without a license, and that's a bug that should be fixed. [...] However, even if we find some improperly licensed files in the package, it's not reasonable to require a full license audit of the package as a condition for releasing, because the vast majority of packages in Debian have no more guarantee of license correctness than this one does.
IANAL... I don't know what the current policy is for Debian, but finding a copyright violation in a debian package is something I think we all take pretty seriously. If we discover that a sound file in a package is mislicensed (and not legal to distribute), it seems prudent to try to confirm that the rest of the files in that package are being distributed under the appropriate license according to the copyright holder(s). If one file was mislicensed, it is possible that multiple files in that package have been mislicensed. Doing this digging or 'auditing' shouldn't be that hard if there are proper copyright notices on all of the files in the package (if there are not proper copyright notices on the files, then I assume we would not upload it!). If at some point we realize that one or more files are not properly licensed, then that means that somewhere *upstream* someone did not put the correct license on some of the files, and we cannot implicitly trust the stated license from that source. At that point we have a responsibility to determine if we can legally distribute the package (or that part of the package). Our goal here is to distribute FOSS. Removing files and packages for which we do not have an open license is not only the right thing to do *legally*, it's the right thing to do *ethically*. -- Robinson -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]